Forget Slave States, Slave CEO's!

Ok. I'm a newb. I've played for just a few days, but I've been reading the forums and documentation for more than a while, in that time and playing a couple of Countryies and Enterprises.

As far as I can see, Enterprises are just slaves of the Countries.

As I happily tried to optimize my sure to be wildly profitable FMU plant (building complementary supply corps, optimizing contracts and open market sales, searching assiduosly for the best countries -- given new players are limited to building in no-president countries --, adjusting salaries, supply purchases, strategies, and quality and efficiency with an eye towards cost and benefit), I noticed that the "Country Resources Used" fee was over 30% of the Sales of the corporation.

For all you free market fans out there, you heard me correctly. The Country gets OVER 30% GROSS!!!!

With these kinds of economics, Taxes simply don't matter. Th

You can make a lot of money...it takes time....I run at a small profit others have much greater profits. HANG ON IN THERE.

What individual CEO corps lack in individual profitability (due to country resources), they are SUPPOSED to make up in sheer volume. CEOs can BUILD a maximum of 750 corps, and they can continue to buy equity stakes in corporations in the share market even after that. No country has the workers required for 750 corps, few empires do, and a CEO can't build 750 corps all in one empire anyway due to the corp-per-country limit.

Continue to patiently grow your CEO to at least a couple hundred corps. Even if each corp makes only half a billion profit per game month, 200 corps is still 100B profit a game month, or enough to build a new corp every game month.

Grow a CEO to the corp cap, and it should by then be a gold coin mill, assuming you sell game cash for GC.

They do have a purpose beyond helping countries, but it takes a lot of time and patience to get there.

EDIT: A lot of players also use CEOs to stockpile w

Thanks for that explanation. I'll just focus on the country.

How do you get to 200 corps, when every corp. loses money year after year? Even corps that you buy that are profitable lose money after this Country Resource Fee is added in?

How can you calculate the Country Resource Fee?

Does it go away in well developed Countries?

Thanks again.

First, "it takes money to make money." Suggestions for making your corps more profitable:

1. Control supply quality. The game documentation says that corps that order high quality supplies produce higher quality product. THIS IS ONLY TRUE TO AN EXTENT. Above 190 quality, the extra quality is wasted but you still pay more. Therefore, set supply quality to 190 for all corps, and make sure you change the automation settings for building new corps too.

It will take time for effects of this to be seen (corps will still need to use up the 300 quality supplies they don't need). You can "dilute" the quality if you cannot wait by manually ordering 100-quality supplies in a proportion that will approximate 190 average quality, but unless you have a calculator, this is subject to wild trial and error. Still, being closer to 190 will still help.

2. Control prices. Set sell price strategies for all corps t

Also, when you join a common market it can help immensely with supply costs. You get your supplies at market value instead of asking price. The other side of the coin when joining a common market is that most common markets require a set amount of production (average c/m asks for around 10%).

Country Resources used by CEO's and paid by CEO corporations is the real money maker for a country. A CEO based economy in your country opens up more options financially for you to use later down the road. As Keith explained, taxing CEO's is counter productive because CEO's can ove their corporations to lower taxed countries that want their business and income for COUNTRY RESOURCES USED. It's like an open competition that CEOs can pick and choose from. So enticing CEOs with a low tax rate is good strategy.

Keith is also correct that CEOs make their profits by shear volume of corps. It takes a very long time to get a CEO that h

Thank you all for your incredibly helpful answers. Apparently I am not frustrated enough with this game quite yet.

Tried some different strategies in my LU Enterprise which seem to be paying off a bit at least. I've also now experienced the pitfalls of trying to buy control of Public companies (With one in particular, I bought only 1% of the firm, but since the other 99% is owned by Investment Funds, I have to run it anyway. Now I'm really working for the MAN!)

One important thing I've found out is that reading everything here is important, and every button on every screen is important in some way.

One or two game mechanic things I thought I might ask here, since I haven't seen the answer:

I've tried the "cancel all contracts" in my common market, but it seems it doesnt really cancel all the contracts. Even by iterating the cancel through all the members a few times. Do I have to ch

What you can do is fiddle with that public and make decisions with it to force the P/E ratio up into a range where the Investment funds will dump the shares. DONT put in orders for those shares until they start dumping or they won't dump them.

The cancelling: It only cancels common/local market contracts. And also it will not allow you to cancel contracts that will leave you under the minimum common market requireent. (For example, if your CM requires a 10% production offer, it will cancel down to 10% offerings)

To cancel COUNTRY contracts you do that through the trade/contracts/country contracts screen. Those you can fully cancel if you prefer, yet isn't advised.

Monthly sales contracts are done by using each individual corporation screen, down in the trade section towards the bottom. Click on set up a contract with another country/corporation. type in the country and then it will let you offer that production t

Can you clarify your remarks about getting investment funds to let go of some of the shares that you might be looking for? I'd appreciate any insight into this.

"What you can do is fiddle with that public and make decisions with it to force the P/E ratio up into a range where the Investment funds will dump the shares. DONT put in orders for those shares until they start dumping or they won't dump them."